Ethics

Inadequate processes are not the source of the problem, although they are part of it. The word that has been used most frequently to describe the source of Oxfam’s malaise is its “culture”, the corporate equivalent of “character”.

By the time you read this, something truly dreadful might have blighted the world. Pinker does not prophesy that this won’t happen; he simply reminds us why it should not and need not, as long as we don’t give up the notion of the emancipatory power of reason to help illuminate the way forward. If that is naive, even more naive is the belief that despair, fatalism or superstition supplies a credible alternative.

“UK plc” has become part of the ordinary lexicon. If anyone finds it objectionable, few say so. No one announced that from now on we should conceive of our country as a business, but gradually, imperceptibly, it became natural to do so. This is how so many cultural shifts happen. Ways of thinking mutate gradually, helped by changes in vocabulary that we accept without question.

In the Balkanised age of the internet, bands that most people have never heard of can fill arenas, and TV series on platforms most people don’t use can have audiences of millions. Jordan Peterson, a clinical psychologist and professor at the University of Toronto, shows that intellectuals can play that game too. His YouTube lectures — with titles such as “Identity politics and the Marxist lie of white privilege” — have been viewed hundreds of thousands of times.

Little of significance has changed since the scandal because the truth is that it was the almost inevitable consequence of a flawed food system, not just a failing of one small part of it. The nub of the problem is that farm produce is now more often a commodity sold on price than it is a product bought for its distinctive value.